The Mulberry Bush (24 page)

Back in Washington in the apartment in Adams Morgan, I woke from a bad dream about Luz and got out of bed before I fell back to sleep and the dream continued. The mail still lay on the floor in the front hall. I gathered it up and took it to the kitchen—twenty pieces of junk, a depressing bank statement, a bill from Lester Briggs. A cheap square envelope with flecks of wood pulp caught in the paper and a Stockholm postmark.

Enclosed was a postcard of Republic Square in Prague with a date scribbled on the back. Prague meant Sofia. I had a feeling that Sofia, combined with Boris, would make me wish that Prague meant Prague.

I set the alarm on my cell phone for five and put it in my shirt pocket, then closed my eyes. When the phone vibrated and woke me up I called Amzi. He was back from wherever he had been.

In gobbledygook I told him where I was going and whom I was meeting.

He said, “Forget about it.”

“Skip the meeting?”

“You're on vacation. Stay on vacation.”

“Why?”

“Because you need the rest and so do I.”

He hung up.

Amzi was right. I needed a vacation. I booked a ticket for Buenos Aires. Then I called Diego and told him I would be arriving the following evening.

He said, “I understand you had a conversation in Bogotá.”

“Yes. That's what I want to talk to you about.”

He said, “I'll be in my office at five-thirty the morning after you arrive. Can you make it?”

“Yes.”

In his white coat, Diego looked like a different man—competence itself and far less genial. His office at the hospital was a hideaway—ostentatiously small, austere, windowless, no decor, not even diplomas.

Diego said, “Did Damián tell you everything you wanted to know?”

“No.”

“I have a surgery in thirty minutes, so this will have to be brief.”

“Does that mean there's not much more to tell?”

“It means I have decided to trust you.”

I doubted that.

Diego said, “I know what you're thinking. When somebody tells you that, it usually means he has decided to prepare you to believe the lies he is about to tell you. But if I hurt you, I hurt Luz. I know her. She will never stop loving you, and I think you know I would never do anything to hurt her in any way.”

I said, “Luz and I …”

He interrupted with a gesture. He knew. Of course he knew.

I said, “Why exactly are you so protective of Luz?”

“Because she is my daughter.”

“Adopted daughter.”

“No. Felicia and I were together. In love.”

“Your best friend's wife?”

“This happened before the marriage.”

“Your best friend's girl, then.”

Diego said, “His betrothed, bought and paid for. My girl. She was pregnant when they married. They didn't have sex before that. She refused him. She and I didn't have sex after the wedding.”

“Does Luz know this?”

“She might suspect. I thought she would realize the truth when she was old enough—look at her, look at the pictures of her mother, imagine me as I was back then, then look at Luz and you will see.”

“Who else knew this?”

“Felicia, who is dead. And because she told him, Alejandro, who is now also dead. Now you.”

“Why me?”

Diego said, “I'll tell you that, and more, when you're ready to believe me.”

“Why do you want to tell me anything? If you know about Luz and me, you also know I have no need to know.”

“Don't be so sure about that.”

Was he offering me hope as Luz's go-between? Did he think this was a weakness he could use to his advantage?

I said, “Why should I believe you?”

“Because I'll give you no choice.”

He pressed a button on his phone. A nurse entered with a syringe in her hand. Diego was rolling up his sleeve. Expertly, the nurse swabbed his arm, inserted the needle in a vein, and drew blood. She handed the vial to me and then left the room.

Diego said, “Send this and a sample of Luz's DNA to a laboratory that compares DNA. There are several of them in Buenos Aires. When you get the results—they'll move you to the head of the line if you pay
a premium—we'll talk again.” He looked at his watch and stood up. “I have to go now.” He left.

The lease on my old apartment in Buenos Aires was still in force. I was staying there. In the bathroom wastebasket I found what I needed—menstrual blood on a sanitary napkin.

I Googled a DNA laboratory and walked the samples over, paying the fee and a substantial extra sum to speed the process, and then went for a walk in the park where I once ran with Boris, who in theory was waiting for me in Sofia. Where, I wondered, would he fit into whatever it was that Diego, the fox of the revolution, was dying to tell me.

Bribe or no bribe, it took seven working days for the DNA lab to complete the test. In the meantime I had nothing to do. There was no reason for me to get in touch with the station and many reasons not to do so.

In dreams I made love to Luz. In my waking mind she was dwindling into some blurred alternative world. Maybe Diego would advise her to give me another chance and she would turn around and come back and everything would come up roses as in some pastel replay of our meeting in Los Bosques de Palermo. I knew that this could not happen. The film had broken.

My powers of concentration weakened. I couldn't read ten pages of a book—I was trying once more to get through the fog of
Ulysses.
Not a single word registered. I tried to play chess and even such a simple thing as solitaire on the iPad. Same result. Movies were the same: I sat in the dark for two hours, eyes on the screen every minute, and emerged from the theater with an empty memory. Music, too: it went in one ear and out the other. Luz had packed up my mind and taken it with her.

One morning as I ran down a path beneath the great trees in the Parque Lezama, someone behind me spoke to me in Russian. I knew the voice. I stopped in my tracks. Arkady caught up.

“You're back in town! What luck. What brings you?”

“Nostalgia.”

“Then you're free. Or are you?”

“Apart from chance meetings with Russians, yes, mostly.”

“Then can you come to dinner on”—he got out his cell phone as if he didn't know his schedule by heart—”Friday, my house? Does that work?”

“Who else will be there?”

“Just the two of us.
Viernes. A las ocho
.”

It had been months since I last saw Arkady. I had half forgotten him along with nearly everything else, but at dinner with a few deft brushstrokes he restored the John Singer Sargent portrait he had made of himself: elegant, well tailored, fit as a fiddle, witty, condescending but infinitely agreeable. The bastard great-grandson, one was supposed to imagine, of a Russian prince shot by the Bolsheviks that fateful October, and a lovely ballerina, quivering with passion, whom the prince had abducted from the Bolshoi.

Dinner was delivered by a caterer, who put it on the table and left. Throughout the meal it was conversation lite. Arkady was just back from a trip to Europe. He had seen a terrific
Magic Flute
at the Wiener Staatsoper, a fine
King Lear
in French, in Paris—and he still savored that left-footed goal I had sneaked by Boris. He, Boris, would never recover. Not many people ever got the better of him.

What had he been doing in Paris?

A stopover. He had had business in Sofia. Had I ever been there?

“No. What's it like?”

“Kafka's dream, Stalin's architects. They have a national museum in the former royal palace with fifty thousand works of Bulgarian art, nothing foreign allowed. The star of the collection is the great Bulgarian artist Vladimir Dimitrov, known to Bulgarians as the Master. He painted women—happy peasant girls picking apples, babushkas looking like they were embalmed, standing up with their eyes open.”

And oh, speaking of Sofia, this was for me. Arkady handed me a blank sealed envelope. I took the envelope and smiled and said thank you, very kind of you, and laid it unopened on the table.

“Coffee? Cognac?” Arkady asked.

He had a bottle of French cognac, also from Paris. It was organic, if you could believe such a concept, so it would make up for the goose that had suffered on our behalf. It was called Peyrat XO. Had I ever heard of it? His cunning, his subtlety, his mastery of information were meant to be noticed. Admired.

While he fetched the coffee and the Peyrat XO, I opened the envelope. Inside was a duplicate of Boris's previous postcard of the Náměstí Republiky in Prague, but on the back, instead of a date, a message in Boris's all but illegible hand. At first it seemed to be gibberish but, shades of the famous Greek cipher last used by the Brits in India in 1857, it was English written in the Cyrillic alphabet. It decoded as: “
Believe the surgeon
.”

When I handed Diego the lab report, he scanned it, holding it at arm's length, then nodded briskly.

I said, “You've seen these results before.”

“Not these particular results. But the same results.”

“There was a doubt in your mind?”

“For many years, before DNA was sequenced, I knew that I might be wrong. We made love the night before Felicia was married, and for several nights before that. She and Alejandro consummated the marriage the following night. Luz was born two hundred and eighty-four days later. How could she be sure?”

He was calm and collected as always. But I had no difficulty imagining how he had felt on the wedding night, how he raged, wept, imagined murdering the man who was raping the girl he loved and who loved him. How hatred took command of his whole being, every corpuscle.

Diego said, “So doubt is now banished from your mind?”

“On this question, yes. As far as I know there's no equivalent of a DNA test for whatever else you're planning to tell me.”

Diego said, “Arkady tells me that the two of you dined together.” A pause. Then he said, “Also that he delivered a message from Boris.”

I said, “True. But why would you tell me that you know that?”

“I am still trying to build trust between us, to show you that I conceal nothing,” Diego said. “It's an uphill struggle. So I now tell you this: During the revolution we had help from the Soviet intelligence service. We were the enemy of their enemy, so they were generous, despite the fact that Alejandro called himself a Maoist. Money, advice, information, encouragement, weapons.”

I said, “Why am I not surprised?”

Diego said, “Boris was the go-between. Is that also no surprise?”

“The go-between or your case officer?”

“A friend.”

“Who was Alejandro's control?”

“We'll get to that. That's the fundamental purpose of this operation. But not now, there is no time. This Saturday I have two surgeries in San Antonio Oeste. We can fly down on Friday and have dinner at the house and on Sunday go for a walk on the beach, where we can speak freely.”

“Why not?”

“Sunday is Alejandro's birthday. Every year the
abuelos
have a party for him and light twenty-eight candles for the number of years he lived, or rather that they believe he lived.”

Luz hadn't mentioned this. I said, “Will Luz be there?”

“Yes. She is already coming for the
abuelos's
anniversary.”

I said, “All right. I don't want to be in Buenos Aires on that day, either.”

“The Aeroparque at four, then. Takeoff at five. Bring warm clothes, a jacket, a hat that won't blow off. It's closer to Antarctica there than here.”

He got to his feet: “Until then.”

I longed for Luz. There was no escaping it, I carried lust in my chest like a sleeping animal. Trying to turn my mind away from this, I remembered something Father had told me for no apparent reason,
as if he were talking about the weather or a movie, namely that he had not married for sex.

I was about eighteen. It was the last trip we ever took together. The two of us were in Kyoto, looking at the rocks and the meticulously raked sand of the famous Zen garden in the Daisen-in temple. My parents were still married.

Despite her good looks, he said, Mother hadn't especially appealed to him—she never had.

“Everybody was getting married,” he said. “It was the season for it. My generation did everything in unison—birth, school, college, politics, job, career, marriage for the supposedly unlimited sex, kids, and after a decent interval, death, with the wife pushing the husband who had outlived his usefulness into the grave with a rattle of dry bones and then cashing the life insurance policy.”

Mother married him, he said, because she thought he was going places. “Basically,” he said, “we married for purposes of display.”

I said, “I don't really want to hear this.”

Then he had said, “Sorry about that. But I'm telling you this for a purpose. Don't make the same mistake. Love the woman you marry, be crazy to fuck her all night, every night until death does you part, and make sure she feels the same about you, that it's a case of genes calling out to genes. Sex isn't everything between a man and a woman, but it's the basis of everything and the only thing worth having in life.”

How right he was.

On the flight to San Antonio Oeste I occupied the copilot's seat. We were flying far above the cloud deck, and the setting sun shone through the glowing cumulus. I had Googled this Beechcraft. Its price, new, was in the millions. I asked Diego why he needed such a large, expensive airplane.

“I don't need it,” he said. “Alejandro did after he started his second life. He paid for it. Every now and then he would send a pilot to pick it up. He would keep it for a week or two, then send it back.”

“He used it to transport drugs?”

“Transporting drugs was what Alejandro did. A sacred duty to the revolution.”

I said, “Wasn't that risky for you?”

“The right fees, I supposed, were paid to the right authorities.”

“You supposed? I was told you were the treasurer of Alejandro's enterprise.”

“Damián told you that? Once a man starts telling secrets he doesn't know when to stop. Yes, it was risky. But someone had to do it, and I could hardly refuse. Alejandro wouldn't let a dollar touch his hand. He lived in Leticia like a hermit saint: bread, soup, water, a fish from the river on Friday.”

“Why?”

“Take your choice. Cover. Madness. Maybe even penance for Felicia. Instructions from the late Chairman Mao.”

I started to ask another question.

Diego said, “Not now, please. I have to visualize the surgeries.”

He switched on the automatic pilot and closed his eyes and seemed to enter into a state of meditation.

After landing we drove directly to Diego's house. It was dark when we got there. He warmed up a dinner his cook had prepared and packed in a picnic cooler.

As we ate, he said, “On the plane you started to ask a question.”

“Never mind. It was off the subject.”

“Nothing is off the subject.”

“All right then. Why do you do these pro bono surgeries? How do your patients find you?”

“I find them. They are the kind of people, sometimes the actual people, Alejandro betrayed to the military, while the rich ones were chosen to sit at the right hand of Alejandro.”

“The ones who survived, they know who you are, who you used to be during the revolution?”

“Not usually. I did not make myself visible in those days. I was called by another name, it was part of the romance. Alejandro gave them the opportunity to die for the cause. The revolution was profoundly class conscious. They were the invisible ones, the expendables who did the dirty work. They were told nothing, they counted for nothing. Now, long afterward, they have no idea what Alejandro did to them. In their minds he coud do no wrong. They're Alejandro worshippers even now. Good night. I have to be up at four.”